[teampractices] Phabricator RFC Closed & Next Steps

[Andre Klapper]

Hi,

== Closing the Phabricator RFC ==

As previously announced [1], we've been facilitating an RFC proposing to
replace Wikimedia's current product management tools and development
toolchain by a tool called Phabricator:
  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabricator

We'd like to thank everybody for discussing and testing Phabricator and
providing very helpful feedback for the last three weeks! In order to
move forward and avoid letting the RFC be forgotten in a dusty corner of
the wiki, it's now time to close and summarize it.

The goal of the RFC was to gauge interest in simplifying our development
toolchain and consolidating our tools (gitblit, Gerrit, Jenkins,
Bugzilla, RT, Trello, and Mingle) into Phabricator. 
At first glance, it seems that there is support for this proposal. The
consensus is also that there are blockers that must be addressed before
any migration is considered, and that any migration must be carefully
planned and as carefully executed.

To be clear: It's not yet been decided to move to Phabricator. The RFC
has shown that there is interest and enthusiasm about Phabricator, and
this means resources could now be devoted to work more specifically on
the blockers and the migration plan. We expect that there will be
another (shorter) discussion down the road to serve as a reality check.
Its format will be lighter than that of the RFC, since its goal will
mostly to check that blockers have been resolved and the migration plan
makes sense.

== Plan for blockers and migration ==

A first phase of the migration would focus on migrating all the Bugzilla
data to Phabricator, and merging the project management work being done
in Trello and Mingle. 
A second phase —that could be worked in parallel— would focus on
substituting Gerrit for code review, and RT. There is also a possibility
to deprecate Jenkins as a continuous integration tool, but this option
is out of scope for now. 
A few blockers have been identified in these areas, and we will
collaborate with the Phabricator community to fix them.

The schedule for this migration depends on resolving those issues which
are blockers for Wikimedia moving to Phabricator. 
The Engineering Platform team at the Wikimedia Foundation would lead
this project allocating the resources necessary to define a detailed
plan, proceed with the migration, and maintain the new infrastructure.

A longer version, requirements to still sort out first, and concerns
raised have been summarized by Quim at
  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabricator/Plan

== Join the next discussions ==

There will be a session about Phabricator at the Wikimedia hackathon in
Zürich this week-end (see [2]), as well as  another IRC discussion next
week (in #wikimedia-office on Wednesday, May 14, at 18:00 UTC:
 http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Phabricator+migration+planning+IRC+discussion&iso=20140514T20&p1=329&ah=1 )


Cheers,
Guillaume and Andre (and Quim)

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-April/075993.html
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich_Hackathon_2014/Topics#Future_of_version_control.2C_bug_reporting_and_other_developer_tools

-- 
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/